Ronald Jenkees:

See, it doesn’t have to be perfect, folks, for you to play music. Sometimes it’s good; sometimes it’s so-so; and sometimes you just have fun with it. And, y’know, not everybody turns on a camera and puts it on YouTube, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play and enjoy it.

Start simple. Make up a couple of melodies — get good at those. Start some more — build on those. Home in on the little bitty parts of the song, and try to work those out, for making a beat. And don’t try to do it big real quick; try to work small, and small ideas, and then it just starts developing into something else. And then hey, before you know it, if you’re honest with yourself, like ‘Would I really like this if I heard it out in the car?’, then you’ll have some stuff that you’re proud of. Otherwise, you’ll have stuff that you might, have a lot of… y’know, ya gotta explain the song, like, ‘Hey, yeah, well, I mean to do this, but I couldn’t, and this and that’… just work on it. Do a good job.

Samuel Fine:

The tumblelogging phenomenon is an interesting solution to the major problem with capital-b Blogging: that humans are intensely diverse and complicated beings, and consistent long-form articles are both impractical and inadequate for the type of creative expression toward which most people strive. In short, I don’t want to write 3 paragraphs about every day of my life, and you probably don’t want to read it. There are better ways to get the job done, and tumblelogging is one of them.

Tumblelogs are an attempt to capture the diverse forms of expression that the web affords; a way to present a reconstructed portrait of our fractured online personalities. This is definitely a problem that needs to be solved, and the problem continues to worsen as we are presented with a rapidly-climing number of ways to put ourselves online. Now that tumblelogging has had an official name for just under four years, I think it’s been long enough that we can make some judgements regarding the format’s success.

Tumblelogging’s most obvious win is that it provides a simple way to share whatever happens to be on your mind at a given moment, with no concern for editing or choosing the appropriate service or anything like that — as Jason Kottke said, A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. For services like Tumblr and Soup, the user need only choose the type of entry (image, quote, link…) and drop in one or two pieces of information.

But there’s always a downside. I’m not the sort that cries about the loss of some likely-imagined higher level of Quality that was part of restricting self-expression to those with more money and technical knowledge; instead, I’m primarily concerned with the increased volume of output that tumblelogs encourage. I don’t necessarily see this as a fault, but I do feel that it means current tumblelog implementations have served to worsen the problem of the reconstructed portrait I mentioned above.

I’ll grant that this may not be a fatal flaw — at least for the moment — but I see potential for the idea to be more than the current ‘post it all here!’ approach. I see tumblelogs being something more like Phil Gyford’s technique of publishing content on a variety of dedicated services, then pulling it all back together to show what was done on a certain day.

But more importantly, I prefer the curated approach. While this reduces the immediacy and freedom, it’s also a mindset that encourages the user to spread meaning. Casual sharing is better done with bookmarks and favorites, where the effort needed is equal to one’s interest.

There’s value in being able to click a few times and share anything at all; there’s more value in sharing stuff that matters.

Although I’d ordinarily include some excerpts, it would be difficult to select any particular sections as more worthy of reproduction. The article is lengthy, but well worth the time it takes to read.

Cleverly, the article borrows heavily from a wide variety of sources, reinforcing (with deliberate exaggeration) its premise that much or all of what we do and make is really an echo of those who have gone before. In this perspective, copyright is best viewed as Thomas Jefferson saw it — a chance to recover one’s investment in creative works.

A digression regarding creativity

As the content on this site indicates, much of what I want to share with the world is my perspective on the ideas and works of others. Maybe I’m less important because I don’t offer much innovation, but maybe I’m more important because I offer a roadmap to places you’re not likely to visit. I gravitate toward people who can show me things I never knew I’d be interested in.

I think we all sit somewhere between the extremes of Production and Consumption. In order to entirely avoid being a producer, you’d need to be a hermit, entirely cut off from civilization and leaving no way for anybody to know you’d lived. But it’s equally impossible to avoid being a pure consumer, because we’re always taking in new information, new perspectives and ideas that will change our view on life and affect the things we make.

As with most things, it’s a continuum — authors and artists and musicians and filmmakers sitting on the producer side; most everyone else towards the side of consumption. We can move around if we want, but for most it’s easier to be passive than creative. And that’s okay, because a lot of what keeps society running doesn’t require or necessarily allow for creativity. Perhaps we’d be happier in a world where that was reversed, but we get by.

And so I think people like me are also important. We’re the ones who try to make up the middle of the gradient, to link the consumers and producers. We do a little bit of each; maybe not great at either, but good at the mix.

So really, I see it all as a balance — art wants an audience, the audience wants art, and the go-betweeners want to connect the two. Although we may scorn each other at times, we’re all much poorer without each other.

Theodore Kaczynski’s unnamed essay, 01971; Iain Banks’ Culture.